What Healy was doing at that moment was passing the window of the projection room, on his way back to the main area of the party to find March. But what he saw through the window stopped him. Not the Sid Shattuck porno film currently being projected on the wall of the room, he was a big boy, he’d seen his share, but the audience sitting there in the room watching the film: a fat bearded guy in a blue T-shirt and some sort of elaborate headband, a woman with long, straight blonde hair and a deep scoop-neck shirt showing off her two scoops, and a thirteen-year-old girl sitting beside them, taking it all in avidly.
Holly.
Healy went in, placed himself between the projector and the wall, tried to ignore the sex act playing out on his stomach. “Holly, hey…I don’t think you should be watching this.”
The fat man butted in. “What’s it to you, idiot? Move. You’re in the way.”
Healy grabbed a fistful of hair without even looking, bounced the man’s face off the glass coffee table in front of him. The glass spiderwebbed from the impact.
“Listen, dickweed, that little girl is a minor. Where do you get off showing her stuff like this anyway?”
“He’s not showing it to me,” Holly protested.
“He isn’t?” Healy looked over at the guy, who was now cradling a bloody nose.
“No,” Holly said, and nodded to the woman next to her. “She put it on.”
Healy looked over at her. What was she, all of nineteen? Twenty? “Yeah, well, she shouldn’t be watching stuff like this either.”
“Watching it?” the woman said. “Man, I’m in it.”
Healy stepped out of the path of the projector beam, took a closer look as the image landed on the wall again, large as life. Ah. Well, there you go. He just hadn’t recognized her with her mouth full.
“Right.” He turned back to Holly. “Look, go home. Your dad told you to go home, go home.”
She was staring daggers at him as he made his way out of the room.
Composing herself, feigning nonchalance, she turned back to the blonde beside her. “Men,” she said, and her new friend nodded in total agreement.
“Hey, by the way,” Holly said, “I’m supposed to meet someone here. Do you by any chance know a girl named Amelia?”
The blonde thought about it. “She in the business?”
“I think she did a film with Sid Shattuck,” Holly said.
The blonde shook her head. “Don’t know her. But if she’s a friend of yours, tell her to stay away from Sid. He’s gross.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “He told me this one chick was his sister, right? Then a few days later, I walk in on them and they’re all, doing anal and stuff!”
Holly favored her with a superior smile. “Don’t say ‘and stuff,’ ” she said. “Just say ‘They were doing anal.’ ”
* * *
Now it was Healy’s turn to go from bar to bar, looking for March. He didn’t find him. At one bar he might have, if he’d been looking up rather than down as the mermaids behind the glass swam past and a man in boxer shorts and a wifebeater with a cast on one arm swam after them, in hot pursuit.
But Healy was looking down at that moment, staring at the cow-shaped slip of paper he’d retrieved from the storage room, trying to make sense of Amelia’s cryptic notes. Flt D—Flight D? Burbank Airport? Was she flying somewhere at 10:30PM? What day?
He pocketed it again and looked up, but it was too late, March was gone. Healy asked the bartender if he knew where Sid Shattuck was.
“The guy who owns the place? Haven’t seen him.”
“How about a girl named Amelia, about so tall, dark hair—”
“Jesus, is everyone looking for that chick? I already told your friend, no, I don’t know her.”
“My friend—was he a guy with a blue face…?”
The bartender looked like he’d finally lost his patience. “No, guy with a cast on his arm. His face was the usual color. Now, are you drinking anything or just keeping me from serving other guests?”
Healy gave him a tight smile, nodded his thanks, moved on.
* * *
Outside, on the deck—one of Shattuck’s many decks—March was doing his best to wring out his sopping undershirt and wondering whether the water might have damaged his cast. It hadn’t been worth it. The mermaids hadn’t known anything.
At least the weather was nice and the view was spectacular, a clear night sky twinkling away above them and the vast bowl of the L.A. cityscape twinkling away below. Immediately beneath the waist-high railing surrounding the pool was a steep grassy hill leading down to a patch of woods and then the fence at the edge of the property. March leaned against the railing and lit one of the cigarettes he’d left on a lounge chair before going for his swim. His clothes were still there, and what was more remarkable, so was his gun in its holster. Sometimes your faith in your fellow man got rewarded.
Now, how was he going to get that holster on single-handed? Literally single-handed. He’d never thought about that expression before, but he thought about it now. Why do people with two perfectly good hands say they’re doing something single-handed when they’re not?
He pondered this for a bit, felt his brain clicking along nicely, not so fuzzy anymore. The night air was sobering him up. That was something, anyway.
He smoked his cig down, pitched the glowing butt over the railing, watched it fall. Then went to get dressed.
“Hey,” a woman’s voice called as he laboriously twisted and pulled his way into the holster strap. She was wearing a beaded and fringed bikini top and a full-on Indian headdress, though under the outfit she looked like a California girl through and through.
“Hey,” March said. “Want to help me out with this?”
She came over, helped him buckle the thing on, got him into his white leather jacket. “You always packing?”
“Sure,” he said, picking up the drink he’d left by the pool, “I’m a cowboy. And you…?”
“Pocahontas,” she said, coyly.
“What do you do?”
Another coy smile. “I do a little acting.”
“Me, too,” March said. “Go like this.” He made a gun with his thumb and forefinger.
“Okay,” the girl said.
“Now shoot me.”
“Huh?”
“Shoot me shoot me shoot me,” March said. “Fucking shoot me.”
The girl went bang bang with her finger and March fell back, one hand to his chest. “Ah! Got me!” He laughed. “Pretty good.”
She did it again. Bang!
“Oh! Ah!” March reeled toward the railing, smiling. He felt the wood against his hip, reached out for it with his hand, felt nothing under his palm but air, and then he was tipping backward, his feet were coming up, and holy fucking shit, he was going over.
He hit the ground hard, the steep grassy hill, and tumbled ass over teakettle all the way down, smashing against rocks and roots and turning full flips in midair. He was so startled he didn’t even try to hug his broken arm to his torso, or his unbroken arm for that matter, or tuck his head. He just bounced like a rag doll until gravity pitched him up against the trunk of a tree with an impact that drove all the air out of his chest. He was wheezing, trying to fill his lungs.
Up at the railing, the girl in the Indian war bonnet clapped merrily. “Woo! That was great!” Then she walked off to find someone else to talk to.